The present invention relates to apparatus for ensuring the proper dispensing of clinical products administered in a hospital or patient-care facility. The apparatus is particularly useful in connection with products which are infused into the bloodstream of a patient, such as blood products, intravenous fluids, and the like.
Proper administration of intravenous products is an important medical consideration. For example, in the case of blood, use of an improperly matched blood product in a patient can result in severe consequences. For this reason, current clinical practice requires careful patient blood type cross-matching prior to administering a blood product. This results in an amount of documentation which is necessarily associated with a unit of blood product infused in a patient.
Blood products are customarily packaged in sealed disposable containers. While in the custody of the blood bank, each blood container has a permanent label which identifies the product by blood group, Rhesus factor, and donor. When an initial request for blood for a patient is made, a unique identification number is assigned to the patient and a sample of the patient's blood is tested to establish the blood type. The recipient's blood is then cross-matched with a unit of donor blood of the same type. The crossmatched blood product is selected by personnel in the blood bank, coded with the patient's identification number, and the blood product and accompanying paperwork released by the blood bank for administration to the patient.
Blood products are often administered in critical care or life-threatening situations. Understandably, the documentation associated with the blood product becomes of secondary importance under these conditions. Thus it is not uncommon for information as to the number of blood units administered, and the specific blood product component--whole blood, platelet rich infusions, packed red blood cells, etc.--to be missing from the patient's chart, or for a single unit of blood product to be referred to a number of times in the patient's records so that it is not apparent to medical personnel responsible for the post-transfusion care of the patient whether one or several units of blood product have been administered.
As a result, much inconvenience and wasted time is encountered by medical consultants whose duty is to establish the previous use of blood component products since their recommendations as to a subsequent course of treatment for the patient is dependent, in part, on the nature of the prior treatment. Not only is this undesirable from a medical viewpoint, but the patient may also be able to successfully challenge the charges incurred for blood product services since the documentation may be very sketchy.
The present invention provides apparatus which preserves the critical cross-matching information which accompanies the blood product, and provides a means whereby the information as to the nature, type and amount of blood infused can be easily entered in the patient's medical record.
This is accomplished by means of a printed label removably mounted on the blood product container which contains information pertinent to the product, as well as areas for entering notations as to the date and time of administration, etc. In a preferred embodiment, the label is provided with a first adhesive area for adhering the label to the blood container, and a second, pressure-sensitive adhesive area which allows the label to be removed from the blood container and to be mounted or pasted in the patient's record. In other words, the self-adherent label is designed to serve a dual purpose, i.e., provide information concerning the blood product while mounted on the blood product container and to serve as a replacement for a hand-written progress note in the patient's hospital chart after the product has been administered. Needless duplication of information is thus kept to a minimum.
It is preferred to mount the label on the blood product container so that the removable, self-adherent portion of the label covers the infusion ports on the container. In order to obtain easy access to the contents of the container, it is necessary for the individual administering the blood product to "peel off" the self-adherent label. The label is then placed in the patient's medical chart or transferred to an intermediate location for eventual transfer to the chart. Because each unit of blood product will have a separate unique label, the amount and type of blood product administered can be readily determined.
Other information concerning the product could be conveyed by means of smaller secondary labels which are attached to the primary drainage-port-covering label by blood bank personnel. One such secondary label could be both color coded to the type of blood product being infused and have a bold-face abbreviation of the contents, e.g., a red label with PRBC (packed red blood cells) imprinted upon it. In addition, a label readable by data processing equipment, such as an optically scannable bar code could be generated and applied by blood bank personnel to each blood product package label. This latter label will contain all information necessary to identify with certainty the contents of the package and its intended recipient, the patient.
In a suitably-equipped hospital it will be possible to utilize the information encoded on the blood product label to "double check" the contents. Immediately prior to infusion of the product this secondary portion of the label will be exposed to data scanning equipment at the patient's bedside. A mismatch of product/patient identity will put the system into an alarm mode. A proper match will automatically register a charge for the service and/or product, at the time of the infusion.
Although the package of the present invention is particularly useful for dispensing blood products, it is also applicable to liquid products destined to be infused in a patient, either intravenously or intraintestinally. The package could also be employed with products prepared in the hospital pharmacy, such as tablets, capsules, injections, and suppositories, to assist in patient record-keeping and to safe-guard against improper adminstration of a drug product.